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Monday, August 21, 2006

Lieberman: Against Rumsfeld Before He Was For Him Before He Was Against Him

Joe Lieberman was on Face The Nation yesterday and did a relatively extended interview with Bob Schieffer and Jim Vandehei of the WaPo. He uttered a number of nonsequiturs and, in my view, unreasonable claims.

While I don't have time to annotate the full transcript, I was struck by his answer to Schieffer's final question:
SCHIEFFER: Tell us what you would do right now that is different than what the president is proposing.

Sen. LIEBERMAN: Yeah. I think there's--three years ago in October on this show you asked me and I said that I believe that it was time for new leadership at the Pentagon. I think it's still time for new leadership at the Pentagon. With all respect to Don Rumsfeld, who has done a grueling job for six years, we would benefit from new leadership to work with our military in Iraq.
Interesting. Lieberman says he called for "new leadership at the Pentagon" in October 2003, and then he mentions Rumsfeld's name.

Interesting to note, then, that back on May 14, 2004 -- several months after Ol' Joe's claimed October 2003 criticism of Rummy on FTN -- that our man Joe wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that "Secretary Rumsfeld's removal would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America's presence in Iraq" (this op-ed was written at the height of the Abu Ghraib-generated pressure on Rumsfeld to resign -- but you know, it doesn't make sense to change horses midstream, even when the one you're on has a bad habit of getting swept away with the current).

And now he's back, flip-flopping again. Got to get rid of Rummy.

Against him. For him. Against him again.

Well, hey, it's not like he's John Kerry or something -- give the guy some latitude to make some flip-flops in his policy positions. Next thing you know those nutty liberals will criticize Lieberman for highlighting his disagreements with President Bush, just because he said
It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril
Come to think of it, maybe that was just some generous across-the-party-lines advice.

1 Comments:

Blogger Vigilante said...

Bashing Rummy is the last refuge of the cowardly complicit and complacent, when the real deal is impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

8/22/2006 12:34 AM  

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